The US and its NATO allies are backing what can only be described as murderous cannibalistic savages in Syria but according to Voice of Russia regular contributor Rick Rozoff: “Apparently, nobody is too gruesome, too ghoulish, too fiendish for the US and its NATO allies not to portray them as freedom fighters, fund them, arm them, train them and bomb the country they’re attacking on their behalf.”

Rick Rozoff

Hello, this is John Robles. I’m speaking with Mr. Rick Rozoff, the owner of the Stop NATO website and international mailing list.

Robles: Advance planning for after these invasions and stuff: they don’t do that anymore, do they? They just go in, take out the leader and who cares what happens afterwards, right?

Rozoff: Yes, you know, “after me the deluge” (Après moi, le déluge) or “after me the catastrophe”, and that’s in fact, that’s a good description of it John. That’s what the Balkans look like, that’s what Iraq looks like, Afghanistan and now Libya, and you know should the West have its way, that’s what Syria would look like, in short order, you’d have gangs like Al Nusra and others, running rampant, running riot, throughout the country, and throwing it into complete chaos and pandemonium.

Robles: I’m glad you mentioned Syria. Before we began recording, you mentioned something about President Vladimir Putin and something he said, which I think reflects really well on the situation that the West is promoting in Syria.

Rozoff: Yes, I didn’t get to read the entirety of it but on Interfax today Russian President Vladimir Putin, in discussing the upcoming Geneva meeting on Syria, the one negotiated by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and American Secretary of State John Kerry, made the comment, I don’t know off the cuff, or quite directly perhaps, that he hopes that the Western-backed opposition forces don’t include in their numbers any cannibals.

And that was clearly an allusion to a videotape that has been making the rounds for the last month or so, where a commander of the so-called “rebel” outfit in Syria (I assume it was a corpse at the time they got started on it) carved up the body of a Syrian soldier identified, they condemned the victim, as having been a member of another branch of Islam, Alawite, and apparently he thought he was eating the heart, I mean he needs some remedial anatomy lessons. But the people who watched the video (I’ve seen it and it it is enough to sicken one) but people watching suggest he actually cut out part of a lung and ate it, red and steaming.

Robles: Oh my God!!

Rozoff: And from what I’ve read subsequent to that, somebody interviewed this very same person about it and he defended that action, and suggested in so many words that the Alawite religious minority in Syria as a whole could face such a fate.

Robles: And these are…? I just want to underline this. These are the same “opposition freedom fighters” quote unquote, that the US wants to arm to the teeth and deliver weapons to?

Rozoff: That’s it, exactly! When the US Senator John McCain, a self-appointed ambassador of war around the world…

Robles: Didn’t McCain say that they’ll make sure the weapons are only going to the hands of those…what word did he use? The…?

Rozoff: “Moderates, responsible” forces.

What do they do? Take the Scouts Pledge? I mean, they’ll put the hand in the air and swear that they are not fanatics and they are not going to ingest and eat somebody’s internal organs?

I think they obviously know who’s going to receive the weapons. But again, if the lessons of Libya, Kosovo, Afghanistan tell us anything – it is that the US not only cannot and will not prevent weapons going into the hands of the most extreme and brutal elements, it will exactly select those elements for the lion’s share of the weapons, as it did with the likes of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and others in Afghanistan in 1980s, as it did with Hashim Thaçi and Ramush Haradinaj and creatures like that in Kosovo in the late 1990s.

So, this is not to be taken seriously. But the fact is, yes, these are exactly the elements that would likely be the beneficiary of US and European arms, with the EU also dropping the ban on weapons for opposition forces within Syria, a move that has been condemned rightly by Russia, amongst other nations.

In the “proud” tradition of the Afghan Mujahidins, supported by the US in the 80s, that skinned the Soviet conscripts alive and threw acid in the face of female teachers while being funded to the tune of billions by the US Government.

Or the organ harvesting and sex slaving, and drugs smuggling Kosovo Liberation Army in the Balkans. And now we are seeing something quite similar in Syria.

Apparently, nobody is too gruesome, too ghoulish, too fiendish for the US and its NATO allies not to portray them as freedom fighters, fund them, arm them, train them and bomb the country they’re attacking on their behalf.

Robles: My goodness!

John Kerry, he’s made some pretty reasonable sounding statements regarding Syria. He also made some pretty harsh statements to Israel which I found refreshing, I might say.

Rozoff: Yes, he could hardly not appear to be comparatively better, you know, coming on the heels of Hillary Clinton. You know, the devil incarnate, if he were to succeed Clinton, would probably have the world’s sympathy for a short period of time only because of how horrendous his predecessor would have been.

And we have to keep in mind, this is Hilary Clinton who roundly condemned Russia and China saying not long ago – a year ago – that Russia and China would have to “pay a price”, that’s a quote from her, vis-a-vis Syria.

She condemned the Russian federal elections in December of 2011 as “being neither free, nor fair”. This is somebody who was on a rampage almost every week ordering some head of state to step down from Ivory Coast to Yemen, from Libya to Syria, so that any modicum of moderation or civility, as Kerry, I agree with you is exhibiting currently, appears all that is much better and contrast to what came before him.

I’m a little bit upset about the statement, however, that the US has now entered late and perhaps so belatedly as to be ineffectual in the process of reaching a political decision in Syria, because that certainly leaves open the prospect that as no diplomatic solution of the crisis inside the country is possible, the US may reserve a military option and intervene in some other manner. But I think you’re absolutely correct that those comments were at least an indirect jibe at his predecessor Hilary Clinton, who instead of demanding a regime change and taking the most hostile and uncompromising, and recalcitrant position on the issue, you know, had she even gone through the motions of suggesting genuine diplomatic measures, including at the UN…

Robles: Oh no, she constantly went on and on about the “forceful removal”…. And that’s all she wanted to talk about.

Rozoff: That’s true. And even if that was the US objective, and clearly it was and remains so, there are certain diplomatic protocols one can abide by in civilized nations, where you don’t make it so overtly obvious and you don’t insult other people in the way that she did Russia and China.

I mean truthfully in my life, I’m 60 years of age, and I can remember Secretaries of State going back to the Kennedy administration and perhaps the Eisenhower one, and I can’t remember anyone making statements quite as insulting and uncompromising, and just gratuitously hostile as Clinton, the one I just cited about “Russia and China would have to pay a price”.

Robles: Oh yes! Well, that was one of the more I think moderate ones coming from her.

Rozoff: Yes, this is the same person who, you know, the day after she had gone to Tripoli to order the hit on Muammar Gaddafi, who was in hiding and the following day was killed in a very brutal and appalling manner, and she was shown the picture of his battered and mutilated corpse, and her first comment was: “Wow!” You know, as though you are talking about some 11-year-old girl seeing a new dance step or something. And shortly thereafter she was shown something else on a cell phone and her exact comment was: “We came, we saw he is dead”.

Robles: This was the one she did I think with Barbara Walters, where she was giggling and seemed to be beside herself with joy, right?

Rozoff: That’s it. You know, some pretty adolescent girl on her first date or something, but you are talking about the gruesome murder of a head of state and a man who was almost 70 years of age. This is the sort of person we are talking about.

We also have to recall that Kerry was the Democratic Party nominee for the Presidency in 2004, and he lost. And Clinton, I think it’s no secret, is the front-runner for the democratic nomination three years from now for the presidency. And there may be a certain amount of professional rivalry, resentment on the behalf of Kerry towards Clinton.

He certainly cannot appreciate coming into the State Department and inheriting a good deal of what Ms. Clinton I’m sure has left him, but not that the world unfortunately, really holds Foggy Bottom to account, the way it ought to. And Hilary Clinton still even has a celebrity status around the world for reasons that really defy my imagination.

But, yes, I agree that Kerry’s statement seemed to be in some manner an admission that the US diplomacy had been dismally unsuccessful in the question of Syria, and that perhaps it’s too late to really do much diplomatically. But I don’t think it’s the best statement to say ahead of the Geneva meeting that was agreed upon by him and by the Russian Foreign Minister. I think holding out some optimism might not be a bad idea.

Robles: Coming into this Geneva conference, the Foreign Minister of France made statements that he had “no doubt” that chemical weapons” were used” in Syria.

Gennady Gatilov, he’s the Russian Deputy Foreign Minister, said he doubted the likelihood that there were chemical weapons used in Syria, so far these have been mostly media reports. He’s also shed doubts on reports that chemical weapons were intercepted in Turkey that were supposed to have gone to the Syrian opposition.

What do you make of all this chemical weapons talk right before the summit? Mr. Gatilov said all that stuff should be put on a backburner and we should concentrate on convening this summit.

Rozoff: Maybe an effort of sabotage the meeting, in fact. And we have to recall two things, President Barack Obama several months ago talked about the use of chemical weapons by the Government forces. He said nothing about the opposition ones.

In Syria, his expression “a red line” that would have been crossed by the Government in Damascus with the unavoidable conclusion, you know, the weapons of mass destruction, or chemical weapons argument, exactly is an integral part, and really the major justification of the US attack on and the invasion of Iraq ten years ago.

And we are not talking about people who are terribly imaginative or innovative, they are going to use the same casus belli, the same excuse they used last time for a war, if they can do it.

And the accusation of the Sarin gas or some other chemical weapon is being used by the Syrian Government forces would provide as close an approximation to the excuse of a rationale used to the attack on Iraq 10 years ago as any I can think of.

And then, moreover, as it’s already been identified, as you’ve mentioned, by the Secretary of State and by the President of the United States as being the so-called red line that cannot be crossed, a line on the sand, which would then I suppose permit the United States to circumvent a traditional alleys or avenues of resolution like the United Nations and perhaps just plunge in militarily claiming it was such an emergency situation they had no choice but to act unilaterally. So, it is fraught with dangers certainly.

You were listening to an interview in progress with Mr. Rick Rozoff, the owner of the Stop NATO website and international mailing list.

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